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Cherie Heiberg back today with another Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy, this time, the Pyro system.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

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Full Transcript

Cherie Heiberg: Hello, welcome to another episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m archivist, Cherie Heiberg. If you’ve never seen Loremaker’s Guide before this is a program in which the members of the Lore team at CIG take you on a guide through the mythology, the history and the science behind all of the systems we’re making for the game. With that let us get started.

Today we are going to Pyro, now Pyro has an interesting history… there we go. It’s an unclaimed system with a red dwarf at the centre, no inhabitable planets yet it still has a somewhat sizable population. It is home to smugglers, criminals, pirates and the brigands of the galaxy. The system… even though it’s not very friendly, it’s fun for pirates to be in, They like it, they have a good time, they control what’s going on, it’s pretty nice. However it is pretty dangerous system to be in because the star in the centre being a flare star which I’ll get into in a moment. Fire fights are not uncommon, there is no political stability unlike Spider which has… Spider’s pretty stable. The pirates home in Pyro is known for a place where you want to go and get some shady, shady jobs and maybe get in a good fight if you want to get in a good fight.

Anyway, also one second… this system is the basis of a level of Wing Commander however the game designers took a little bit of liberty with the design of the system because there is no such thing as a prolonged nova phase, that is made up. The nova is an instantaneous event but I think they thought it sounded a little bit more jazzy for the video game.

So, let’s get started. This here is Pyro, it is the star at the centre of the Pyro system, like I said it’s a red dwarf which is an M-class main sequence red star. What a flare star is… is it’s a star that exhibits unusually violent solar activity… solar flare activity. Most of the ones that we know of are red dwarf stars, there can be others but vast majority that we know of are red dwarves and what happens is that the luminosity and the brightness of the star, which are more or less the same thing, engage in such sudden flares of brightness that they can get ten thousand times more powerful than any solar flare that our sun had ever produced.

So, there are definite like wicked flames that happen sometimes. Let’s put it this way, so the flares are so powerful you’d get way, way, way, way, way, way, way more than a particularly interesting aurora like we would on our own planet. A flare star Ursa Major increase in brightness fifteen fold in 2013 for three minutes and then returned to normal. So like… schwoooo, which is kind of the thing you get here on Pyro. It creates and incredible amount of xray radiation, it can create ultraviolet radiation, anything that would make life… the development of life completely inimical to what happens in the solar system. You know, good times.

Therefore you can take it for granted that Pyro I is a terrible place to live. It’s a blackened little rock that’s very small, it’s sort of like Mercury in that it orbits close to the sun and is just like totally burned out and maybe it had a surface at one point but it certainly doesn’t anymore. It’s just kind of like this horrible, charred little rock floating in space. You’re not really going to get anything out of it.

Same with the Akiro Cluster or Akiro Cluster, depending on who you’re asking. It’s just a little cluster of asteroids that chills out here, kind of near the Lagrangian planet Pyro I. There’s not much to be found there, people say that the mining has been… that strip mining has taken everything from the planet, I mean not the planet, the asteroids. You guys know what I mean. So, it’s not really worth your time I would say.

Let’s go over here to Pyro II, which is a coreless planet. Now coreless planets are interesting, it’s not that they are hollow which is a common misconception, it’s that they don’t have a differentiated metal core. So like our planet has a core, it’s kinda like a core and a mantle and a crust. It’s like different layers so if you like slice the planet open it would look like a really cool layer cake but if you slice Pyro II open it would just be an undifferentiated mass sort of like a cake with no layers. Again like any minerals that would have been worth mining on the planet have been stripped away sadly but you know, it doesn’t hurt to try from time to time.

Here is Pyro III, it is a lava planet. It has unusually strong tectonic activity, it has seas of lava criss crossing the system… criss crossing the entire planet. It’s possible that it’s caused by a collision, like a piece of a planet sized body broke off, hit the surface, just caused so much damage and energy that the whole surface melted and it’s really not been the same since. Now the reason that we think this is probably what happened is because of what happened to it’s neighbour Pyro IV.

Which used to be a planet in the system, just kind of chilling out having it’s own regular orbit until a planet sized body hit it and it was knocked out into this totally ridiculous orbit and it is slowly settling into the orbit of Pyro V. Which is all the way over here so we’re going to have to adjust that later, it should be closer.

Zoom in right here to Pyro V, which is a gas giant. It doesn’t have a pure hydrogen atmosphere so it’s not really, you know, it’s not really a good place to refuel but it does have a bunch of really cool moons. All are named after various concepts that are related to fire like Vatra, Vuur and Aoir, Ignis and Fairo and Fuego, that was an easy one. None of them are inhabitable, all of them are decently hot. They kind of vacillate between hot and cold really because they’re far enough away from the star they should be pretty cold but the solar flares do reach all the way out to this point sometimes and that doesn’t really make it a very good place to park your ship because you never know when a solar flare will hit.

Let’s see here, here’s the last planet in the system… Pyro VI. Now Pyro VI isn’t interesting because it’s a little planet on the outskirts of the system, it is interesting because of what is around it which is Ruin station. The home to all piracy in Pyro, this is the base that’s always under contention for who is the true ruler. Usually a couple of gangs kind of go back and forth between who’s the one in charge and who’s the one fighting to be in charge. It’s got a nice little bar on it where you can go that’s more or less stable but, you know, you’re going to get the occasional bar fight there.

It was once a Gold Horizon terraforming platform, no one really knows why there’s a terraforming platform around a planet that is completely unterraformable but Gold Horizon didn’t go bankrupt because of their sound business decisions. Be an excellent place to make connections with other pirates, with other smugglers, perhaps other outlaws if that’s what you care to do. You need to be aware that you will most likely get involved in a firefight of some kind. I know I’ve emphasized this point more than once, but I just want you to know. If you want to find crime, you’re going to find it in Pyro.

Thank you for tuning into this week’s episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once again I’m Cherie Heiberg, the archivist with the Lore team and I’d like to thank our subscribers for making this program possible and you all have a wonderful rest of your day, bye.

A polite Canadian who takes pride in making other peoples day brighter. He enjoys waffles with Maplesyrup, making delicious puns and striving for perfection in screaming at the T.V. during hockey games.